Getting There

A promising sign is that Melissa seems to be getting back to normal. I am sure she doesn’t think so. Maybe it’s being off steroids, maybe it’s that things feel stable. Whatever the reason, she is more like herself. Feisty, coming up with all kinds of ideas.

The weird thing in recovering from something like this is that there is a border zone where you’re still down but getting better. It’s a hard place to be because you start to think of things you want to do but can’t do. Or you stop to pause for a minute to think of all you’ve been thru.

A friend from Christ Church sent her a quilt that is soo Melissa: it has squares with Scripture, mostly from Psalms. It’s beautiful and touching.

So many things come to mind about this ordeal. First, the prayer pager is a witness. We told a number of people about it, and they were touched and impressed. The neatest thing was one day when it went off and John said, “Mommy, someone is praying for you!”

We have been very fortunate so far; the odds were in favor of Melissa having already been readmitted to the hospital to fight an infection or some such. I guess we have taken that for granted, because now that she is “in quarantine” at her aunt’s because of the stomach virus, we’re all a little sad. The simple things become important in times like this—simple things like managing your time. So that when you anticipate a day that you can spend together and you don’t get it, resentment sets in. It has been a struggle not to feel sorry for ourselves, which seems so weird because there were worse things we gritted thru with not much thinking about it.

Today, her platelets were 21, another increase. Nowhere near out of the woods, but maybe it’s getting better. The only thing good I can say about having sick babies is that you wake up a lot and then you have time to pray.

One of the things I figured early on in all this was that it was going to make me reexamine things. I was going to have to come to grips with what is truly important. The sad fact of the matter is that I knew that you just generally float along from here to there, getting by day by day, pursuing some things, dropping others, having dreams that get laid by the way for no better reason than that they weren’t the order of the day for enough days in a row.

I knew also that I might become one of those frustrating people who was going to ask way too many questions and be impatient when nothing happens. I’d say that’s probably where I am. I hope where I am going is to a place that can be graceful but inflexible when it comes to the things that matter. Like I know!

People tell you to make a list of all the things you want to do in life. I guess that’s a useful exercise, but it can also make you feel bad. I have in my head that I need to have things like skydiving or going to Patagonia on my list. But they’re not on my list. In fact it’s not very dramatic at all. I don’t really have a list, other than to say that I hope things turn out well and I can be good to the people around me. I want a pop-up trailer where we can stop wherever we feel like it. Nowhere special to go. Maybe a canoe. I’d like a few acres to plant a few fruit trees, a place I can get to every month or so and just veg out. That’s it. At some point when things calm down I need an unspecified period of time on the California Central Coast so I can just stare at the water until I know it’s time to quit staring.